Michel Foucault cut a fascinating figure across the face of contemporary philosophy. Flamboyant and irreverent, he delighted in being difficult to categorize and never held still during his all-too-brief career. Likened to "an outrageous drag queen at a vice cops' ball," he frustrated many by his refusal to be claimed by any one school of thought, and many more for what seems like willful obscurantism. 'Who are you?' and 'What are you trying to say?' are two questions he never answered. To his would-be detractors who complained about his shifting positions and his tendency to say that objections to his work weren't really directed at the place from which he was speaking, he says: "leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write" (AK 17).
Though the above answer is more in keeping with Foucault's style, there are responses to these charges of evasiveness and over complexity that are closer to the truth. One of these is that Foucault's thought developed so rapidly that it would have been an impossible feat for him to say "This is what I think about discourse." His views grew, changed -- and occasionally reversed themselves -- from year to year.
Which brings us to the views in question. Foucault's thought can be divided into two broad categories. There is the early work, which Foucault calls archaeology, and the work that follows The Archaeology of Knowledge, which he calls genealogy. Archaeology is concerned primarily with discourse, genealogy with the analysis of power.
Taken as a collective, Foucault's first four books comprise an attempt to formulate a new kind of history. This history takes the whole of Western thought since the Renaissance and analyzes it in terms of broad unities he calls discourses. How his usage of the word differs from its usual meaning is, in large part, the subject of this chapter.
Foucault's central thesis in his early work is that discourse is self-regulating system, one that determines its own objects, subjects, concepts, and strategies. While it seems intuitive that things determine what is said about them, and that who is speaking will determine what is said, Foucault is convinced that discourse actually constitutes its own objects and ordains the places from which a subject can speak. Setting aside for the moment his reasons for believing this to be the case, his project is to describe the conditions of possibility for the formation of the elements of discourse.
2.1 The Order of Things
It is order -- the division of things into categories -- that enables us to name, to speak, to think. And it is order that is the subject of The Order of Things. In this work, Foucault makes a few fairly intuitive claims about order and how it is experienced, and traces out the consequences of those claims.
His first observation is that, in any given order, the order itself is neither necessary (given in the objects ordered), nor immediately perceptible (OT xix). Order, then, is essentially an act. It is not something discovered or required; rather, it is something carried out. It may be given in things (some types of order will be more apparent than others), but it exists only in the act of examination (OT xx).
He then notes that any act of ordering must take place on a certain site, much like a table would be the site for ordering a pile of skeins of yarn of differing colors and sizes. It is the site which provides the "grid of identities and similitudes" that allows us to sort things (OT xix). This notion of a "site" will be crucial to the work in this book.
Given the notion of a site, it will be apparent that there are preliminary criteria for any act of ordering (OT xx). Foucault claims that a primitive culture will order things based primarily on tradition. In such a culture, one is trained to think about things in a certain way, and one's categories of thought will not stray far from these culturally-determined empirical orders. Foucault refers to this phenomenon as the "encoded eye," which refers to the fact that the individual has been programmed to see things according to the codes of his culture (OT xx). The preliminary criteria at this stage are simply cultural codes. I would add that it is at this stage that the notion of a divinely inspired order becomes possible, as order is experienced as given and not as a product of thought.
At some point, a culture drifts away from its spontaneous orders, and makes the realization that beneath the level of transparent order, there is a level of things which can be ordered. In short, the culture becomes aware of order. It is at this point that the culture realizes that its empirical orders are neither necessary nor the best possible ones (OT xx).
The order of things now divides into three regions. There is the encoded eye, and at the other extreme, we have science, which is a reflexive reflection on order, why it exists, and what laws it obeys (OT xx).
But in between these two extremes of the encoded eye and the reflexive study of order, there is a third region which is more fundamental, if a bit more obscure and confused. Between cultural codes of ordering and reflection on order itself, there is a middle region where order and its modes of being are experienced (OT xxi).
Foucault seeks to analyze this middle region. He will do this by observing the character and shifts of the Western site of order in thought on words, living beings, and economics. The focus, no matter how far afield the analysis may go, is always a description of how order has been experienced through the last four hundred years of Western history.
Foucault would remind us at this point that this new history, this archaeology, is not a history of knowledge. It is rather an investigation into the basis of what makes knowledge possible (OT xxii). Foucault seeks not to trace what various people have said about this or that subject, but rather to uncover the epistemological field -- the site -- that allows a given idea to appear.
2.11 Order in the Renaissance
The Renaissance world is ordered according to a complex system of resemblances. Knowledge in this period is obtained by following chains of similitude. Resemblance
Knowledge in this period is knowledge of texts. The entire universe is a book of symbols, linked by resemblance, and knowledge is obtained by interpreting them (hence Foucault's phrase åthe prose of the world') (OT 35). The world is a text, and human language forms a text imbedded in it. There is no clear distinction between words and things at this time -- they are similar entities, and knowledge of both takes the same form (OT 36). This knowledge consists in "relating one form of language to another; in restoring the great, unbroken plain of words and things; in making everything speak" (OT 40).
The Renaissance world is one where beings have a "grammar" which is articulated in signs and signatures, and given that knowledge comes from "reading" these signs, the proliferation of commentary and exegesis in this period of history is not only predictable, but absolutely necessary. This process of obtaining knowledge is by its very nature infinite, as every text will require its own commentary to ferret out ever-deeper levels of meaning. "The whole world must be explored if even the slightest of analogies is to be justified" (OT 30).
By Foucault's account, The Renaissance draws to a close with Descartes. It would be misleading, however, to imply that it was the power of Descartes' thought which brought the period to an end. The irruptions of discourse are both profound and pervasive, and to attribute them to the force of individuals is to greatly oversimplify them. We can only say that Descartes is most emblematic of the changes that took place as the Renaissance era gave way to the Classical. We could call Descartes the "Classical Moment."
But before we can give an account of the Classical period, a word or two must be said about the sign, and its constitution in the Renaissance. The Renaissance sign is a trinary relation: it links the signified, the signifier, and the resemblance between them. Resemblance, then, is both the form and the content of the sign. A sign's meaning is simply a resemblance. Hermeneutics (the theory of meaning) and semiology (the theory of signs) are one and the same. To find a meaning is to find a resemblance, and to know the laws governing signs is to know which things are alike (OT 29).
2.12 The Birth of Representation
The rise of the Classical era is marked by a double collapse of language. First, resemblance drops out of the relation between signifier and signified, making the sign a binary relation. Concurrent with this change is the vanishing of the relationship between language, the text below, and the commentary above (OT 42). What this means is that the general site of order, of knowledge, has shifted. The constructive role of resemblance has been usurped by representation.
This event has vast consequences for knowledge in the Western world during the seventeenth century. I will explore these in some detail, but for now I would like to continue to concentrate on the sign, for it is here that the discontinuity between eras makes itself most apparent. The Classical sign exists only where there is a known possibility of substitution, where a signifier can stand for a signified. And this substitution is effected by a knowing subject; thus the Classical sign is constituted in knowing alone. By contrast, the sign in the Renaissance era is a discovered thing -- it links signifier and signified through some found resemblance in nature (OT 59). The Classical sign is arbitrary; the Renaissance sign speaks the secret tongue of God. The Classical sign is organized into two parts: it not only represents the signified, but also the act of representation itself. The sign offers itself both as the thing it stands for and itself as a sign (OT 64-65).
I have spoken of two different "eras:" the Renaissance and the Classical. What separates them is the site of ordering, the conditions of the possibility of knowing. Foucault introduces a term for this site or set of conditions that will be a useful shorthand expression. The term is episteme, and from now on I will use it in place of "era" and "site" (OT 30). But the use of this term requires a great deal of caution -- more than Foucault exercises, in fact. The reasons for this will be addressed in a later section, but for now it will do to simply remember that Foucault's definition of "episteme" is neither distinct nor particularly stable.
Knowledge in the Classical episteme is the ordering of things by means of signs, and this order is based solely upon identity and difference (OT 57). Signs only stand for things, and are not beings in their own right. As a result, language is both transparent and neutral (OT 56). Transparent because we look right through it to beings. It is a lens through which we view reality. Neutral because words, not being things themselves, need not enter into considerations of what is to be known. Semiotics and hermeneutics are superimposed, as the theory of signs simply is the analysis of meaning (OT 66). Language is, in fact, an embodiment of thought, and not an object of knowledge, as we shall see.
2.121 General Grammar
In the Classical episteme, language was seen as an analysis of thought. General Grammar is the study of how simultaneous representations are verbally articulated and ordered by language. Its basis is in examining the sequencing of the simultaneous (OT 83). Being the study of how representation manifests itself in language, it is not to be confused with the study of word usage in any particular language.
Foucault's treatment of General Grammar -- the study of language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- is not intended to sum up a period's opinions on language. It is rather an attempt to describe the conditions under which language could be an object of knowledge in the Classical episteme (OT 119). It is what makes those opinions possible that Foucault wishes to address.
The heart of General Grammar is the idea that language does not speak -- it analyzes. It gives a linear order to the fragments of representation in the mind's eye which come all at once (OT 115). Language, then, is the articulation of the simultaneous in space. And because the act of naming is at once the verbal representation of a representation, and the placement of that representation in a general table, this implies is that if all names were exact, there would be no possibility for error in either language or thought (OT 116). Language, then, is its own primitive philosophy. It is both spontaneous and an analysis of representation. It is the "original form of all reflection," and General Grammar takes this phenomenon as its object, seeking to discover how language orders representation (OT 83).
The relationship between language and representation has four segments: attribution, articulation, designation, and derivation. Attribution, or the theory of the verb, is what gives language its representing function. The proposition is the basic element of language, and the verb links subject and predicate by an act of affirming. The verb is the judgment that "this is that," and its function is the very essence of language (OT 93-95).
Language is articulated in two ways: either from the specific to the general, or from the substance to quality. The former is articulated in substantives, the latter in adjectives. All of these articulations are names, the substance of language (OT 98).
If the being of language is verbal attribution, then its origin is primary designation. The original function of language (as seen by General Grammar, of course). was naming. The nature of designation is pursued by the analysis of the language of action and the study of roots. These studies reveal the genealogy of language. It is important to realize, however, that this genealogy is not a history. It is rather a table of the grid of thought, the general pattern of representation (OT 104, 108-109).
Finally, the theory of derivation attempts to trace the alterations of meaning that words are subject to. These alterations follow spatial principles which are manifest in figures and writing. It is the view of General Grammar that phonetic writing -- the breaking down of language into representable sounds -- is the beginning of language as analysis and reflection (OT 110-112). These segments will map quite easily onto Classical thought about living beings and money, and can be taken as the ways in which representation manifests itself in the Classical episteme.
2.122 Natural History
The essence of Natural History (and the signature of knowledge in the Classical period) is the arrangement of things on a table. Where General Grammar showed the full play of representation in Classical thought, in Natural History taxonomy reigns supreme (OT 131). Knowledge in the Classical episteme is only possible through the universal tabulation of all possible differences. Empirical individuals can only be identified by their differences from all others. A thing is what other things are not (OT 144).
The central element of Natural History is structure. Structure performs the role of both proposition and articulation in language. It permits a point of entry for scientific analysis, and patterns representation into discrete articulations (OT 136). The roles of designation and derivation are filled by character -- that which enables one to tell one structure from another (OT 139). Structure may be likened to a proper noun, but character allows Natural History to complete itself as a language by providing for structural genera. Though Natural History and language both arise from the binary nature of representation, the former is a "well-formed" language which unites attribution and articulation in structure. Structure is a proposition that articulates exactly what can be attributed to it. And character, unlike words, is immune to derivation (OT 158).
Natural History presupposes a continuity of beings, dispersed on a table such that there are no gaps. The point of Natural History is to properly construct a taxonomy that will reveal this continuity (OT 149). The priority of spatial relationships in the taxonomy of being determines the role of time in the Classical episteme. The phrase "natural history" is a bit misleading, as there is no real history being discussed here. Time, in Natural History, simply allows nature to assume all possible characters -- to fill every available place in the taxonomy of being. In place of historicity, Natural History gives us succession (OT 154).
2.123 The Analysis of Wealth
The play of representation also reveals itself all that is said about economics during the Classical period. According to the Analysis of Wealth, money receives its value purely through its function as a sign (OT 176). It represents the value of its constituent metal (OT 171). And that value can, of course, be substituted for an equal value of any other commodity. So wealth works like representation: it creates relations of equality and inequality, and represents itself through the universal exchangeability of wealth through money (OT 179).
The Analysis of Wealth corresponds to Classical thought on language and living beings in several ways. For instance, speed of monetary movement (that which enables commodities to demonstrate their exchangeability ). is equivalent to taxonomic extension in Natural History (OT 185). The theory of value combines the two theoretical segments of General Grammar (the theory of the proposition and the theory of roots). In the Analysis of Wealth, affirmation and designation are the same thing, and do not require separate explanations, since designating something as valuable is the same thing as affirming its value (OT 191).
2.124 The Character of the Classical Episteme
It can be seen, then, that order in nature, wealth, and representation through words all have the same mode of being. Foucault calls this mode taxinomia (OT 203). The whole of the Classical episteme hinges on the continuity of being, and its most distinguishing features include "ontology defined negatively as an absence of nothingness, a general representability of being, and being as expressed in the presence of representation." For the Classical mind, ontology is transparent by virtue of its representability, and by the fact that representation is uninterrupted. Representation unfolds the continuity of being (OT 206).
Hence Descartes' pronouncement that the only barrier between ourselves and Truth is the lack of clarity and distinctness in our ideas. Perfectly clear thought (which of course implies perfectly clear language ). would simply experience the order of being through utterly transparent representation. One can only envy the Classical thinker: at no time in human history was it believed that absolute knowledge was so close at hand.
Sadly, as we shall see, the precise arrangement of words, plants, animals, commodities and money was about to fracture and split, revealing a world inaccessible to representation -- a world where the old taxonomy floats on a realm of silence like cracked ice floes on dark water.
2.13 The Limits of Representation and the Birth of History
The Classical episteme drew to a close over a period of about fifty years, centered on the turn of the nineteenth century. In this brief span of time, General Grammar, Natural History, and the Analysis of Wealth simply disappeared. Language, living beings, and economics are now the domains of three new sciences: philology, biology, and political economy. But it is important to realize that the Classical period does not end with the replacement of the former group of disciplines with the latter. Philology, biology, and political economy all arise in areas where the former sciences were silent. The Modern episteme is not substituted for the Classical -- it is rather established in the space left open and unspoken by representation (OT 207).
The space of knowledge in the Modern episteme is no longer that of a general taxinomia. It is now made up of organic structures whose unities are based on function. The structures are not ordered by identities and differences, but by principles of analogy deployed in a temporal order (OT 218,219). Once again, the irruption in the site of knowledge brings with it a host of new objects and concepts that could not have formed in an earlier time. Chief among these is Man as the object of his own knowledge -- a recursive phenomenon which will dominate the thought of the twentieth century. But perhaps the single most significant consequence of the break with the Classical episteme is the invasion into all things by historicity (OT xxiii). It is not only the birth of Man, but also the birth of Time.
In this crucial period extending from the 1770s to the 1820s, new principles were unearthed in the studies of economics, living beings, and language that could not be reduced to representation. The first of these principles which are exterior to representation makes its appearance in the Adam Smith's analysis of wealth: labour. Labour, and the conditions of human finitude in which it exists, is now the basis of value. This principle disrupts the classical notion of equivalencies (OT 225)
Cuvier makes the break with Natural History when he leaves the visible out of the idea of character, and replaces it with organic structure. This internal principle, based on funtion rather than a spatial arrangement of parts, is irreducible to representation (OT 227). Language, like life, begins to reveal elements exterior to the tabular space of representation. This element is form. It is related neither meaning, articulation, nor designation. Language is found to have formal elements which impose an order unrelated to the representing function. This element of language is inexpressible in General Grammar (OT 235). From the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, the very being of language will be located outside its ability to represent.
"Things [ä] have now escaped from the space of the table." (OT 239). Beings have posited an internal space to which representation is exterior. They no longer exist as markers in a taxonomic space; they now well up from an essence which cannot exist in that space. Representation ceases to be the locus of knowledge and the basis for empirical investigation (OT 237)
If the Classical moment was Descartes, then Kant is the Modern moment. Kant's critiques abandon the analysis of representation, and instead question its proper limits (OT 242). This questioning is one of two new forms of knowledge that are made possible by the collapse of homogenous representation. The first is, as we have seen with Kant, the questioning of representation on the basis of what makes it possible. This investigation gives rise to the notion of the transcendental subject, which, though finite, determines the conditions of all experience. The other line of investigation opened up is questioning representation on the basis of what is represented. This investigation locates three new entities -- labour, life, and language -- which exist on the very limits of experience (243-244). Exchange is displaced by production, nature by life, discourse by language. These new entities bring fort a host of new objects, concepts, and methods (OT 252). It is the death of the Classical discourse which makes metaphysics -- a metaphysics of Will, Life, and Word -- possible (OT 243)
In the modern episteme, the table can only display effects of structures and systems which are not divisible in a tabular space. The table is now a mere surface (OT 251).
2.1301 Political Economy
The economic principle of labour completely changes the analysis of wealth. To begin, value is no longer a sign, it is a product (OT 254). Labour has its own causality which gives rise to a linear series of production. Economics is now articulated on history. The analysis of labour thus binds any analysis of wealth to time, and value aquires its own historicity (OT 255)
Because value is produced, the conditions of its existence are determined by the finitude of the labourer, who must be fed and clothed, and ultimately dies. Economics no longer exists in the space of representation, but rather in a place where life confronts death. In the Modern era, economics has become anthropological (OT 257)
The relation of economics to human finitude has consequences for History that will fuel the thought of thinkers as diverse as Marx, Ricardo, and Neitzsche. For while man's finitude gives economics its historicity, History moves far beyond man's basic animal needs. At some future point, the interaction of scarcity and labour must reach an equilibrium. And at this point, History ends - brought to a halt by the very finitude that makes it possible (OT 259). It is in Political Economy that we see the first discussions of an End to History, where the idea of an Origin so essential to the thought of the likes of Heidegger makes its first appearance.
2.1302 Biology
It is Cuvier that frees the characters of living beings from taxonomy by making character an issue of organic structure. Organic structure, which is determined by function rather than some spatial arrangement of features, exists prior to any classification (OT 263). Organic structure exists between articulation and designation, in a space inaccessible to an order dictated by pure representation (OT 231). It is this new notion that radicalizes the division between the living and the nonliving. Natural History saw all of nature spread out on a table, and while minerals may be different from plants and animals, they existed in the same taxonomic space (OT 231) It is now possible to talk about Life, a concept which Foucault argues did not exist before Cuvier.
The tabular space of Natural History is disrupted in another way. The homogenous field of identity and difference is superseded by functional unities which go much deeper (literally penetrating the animal ). than any structural identity. "Before, the living being was a locality of natural classification; now the fact of being classifiable is a property of the living being." (OT 268). Differences now exist against a background of analogical Sameness, and no longer provides a creature with its character (OT 265)
These fractures in the Classical taxonomy have serious consequences for all Modern metaphysics:
Life, like economics, reveals its own historicity once it is freed from the table (OT 275 ). It is now possible to speak of evolution, of the progression of organic structures through time, as opposed to the simple succession of one structure by another.
2.1303 Philology
The rise of philology and comparative grammar are to words what the advent of comparative anatomy is to living beings. Much like animals, languages are now related through a network of analogy that reveals their genealogy (OT 280). Where biology examined the organic structure of a creature, the new science of language will find its basis in form -- the roots and inflections of words and syllables.
The formal element of language permits comparative grammar -- comparisons in which meaning is not relevant. Tracing the history of a given sound or letter gives us a way to study and compare languages in a way completely exterior to designation. Words are now seen as linked by grammatical and morphological relations and not through the intermediary of representation (OT 236). The meaning of a word -- what it represents -- is no longer what constitutes its being. Words still bear meaning, of course, but their essence and their historicity is bound up with an element outside the space of representation (OT 280).
General Grammar depended on the verb "to be" as a transition between thinking and speaking; it was the very ground that made articulation possible. But in the Modern episteme, language aquires not only a being proper to itself, but self-contained body of laws (OT 295).
Language, like production and life before it, has now become an object of knowledge. But this "demotion" from the place it held for the Classical mind -- that of the lens through which reality is perfectly viewed -- leads to the rebirth of exegesis. Language must be interpreted because its forms govern our discourse. So we are brought to the present, where interpretation and formalization stand opposed as our only two forms of analysis (OT 299).
We can see then that when the taxinomia of the Classical episteme was dissociated, its contents regrouped around life, labour, and language (OT 304). Where before there was a continuos field of being, deep gaps have opened. Being can now be described as branching through time instead of being distributed through space. The site of knowledge, the episteme, has shifted from a taxonomy revealed through representation to an interplay of finitude and historicity uncovered by a transcendental subject.
2.131 The Emergence of Man and the Analytic of Finitude
Man, as such, did not exist in the Classical era. He had no place on the table of being, and his nature was solely that of an ordering agent of nature. He is the subject of all knowledge, and the object of none. Human nature (such as it is in this period) relates to nature in predictable and purely accessible ways (OT 310). With the collapse of discourse (the unfolding of being through language) and the emerging opacity of language, it becomes possible to sidestep representation and question the nature of the speaker. At this moment, Man emerges as both the subject and object of knowledge (OT 312).
The breakdown of Classical taxinomia has shifted the nature of representation. Beings no longer manifest their identity in representation. What is now represented is a being's relation with a human being -- with a subject (OT 313).
Though it is Man who speaks, who exists at one extreme of evolution,
Because Man's existence is determined by life, labour, and language, he is made exterior to himself. All those things which give access to him are outside and anterior to him. He is a being constituted by exterior, finite entities.
Man's finitude is contained in the very positivity of his knowledge. Each of Man's forms of knowledge is finite -- but it is their very finitude which makes their positivity possible. To put it another way, it is finitude: the space of the body, the limits of desire, the time of language which render all knowledge possible. And it is through these forms that Man learns of his own finitude (OT 314).
It is this mutually sustaining relationship between finitude and positivity that Foucault terms the Analytic of Finitude, and it replaces the metaphysics of representation as the foundation of all the forms of knowledge (OT 317). The Analytic of Finitude reveals all the finite forms of knowledge which, in turn, indicate the finitude of man (OT 315).
Finitude and positivity repeat one another, thus opening up the entire space of knowledge in the Modern era. The positivity of life, labour, and language reveals the limits of knowledge; inversely, the limits are the positive foundation of the possibility of knowing (OT 316-317). Foucault's analysis finds three different forms of this repetition, and he claims that all that is possible to be said in this era can be placed in one of them.
2.1311 The Empirical/Transcendental Double
Since the new site of all analysis is the finitude of man, it will be the empirical contents of knowledge that will be examined to reveal the conditions of knowledge itself (OT 319). This direction of analysis takes two forms: a search for the nature of knowledge, and a search for a history of knowledge. But both routes will be caught in the same paradox -- an oscillation between a grounding in empirical truth (where the true discourse will based on the truth of the object) and a grounding in some transcendental (where the truth of the discourse determines the truth in formation) (OT 319-320).
2.1312 The Cogito and the Unthought
If it is the empirical contents of knowledge which make all knowledge possible, then man cannot posit himself as either a fully self-conscious being, nor as that which is forever objective and unconscious. Man, then, is caught in a second repetition between self-awareness and those parts of his being which remain outside the cogito (taken here to mean thought conscious in itself) (OT 322). The Modern cogito is not a Cartesian statement of truth so much as a task to constantly articulate thought in the non-thinking. But as man is "that which thinks," the Modern cogito places part of man's being outside himself -- in the unthought yet to be addressed by thought (OT 324-325).
2.1313 The Retreat and Return of the Origin
This displacement of part of man's essence outside himself leads to a final doublet which Modern thought must traverse -- the retreat and return of the Origin. Foucault uses the term Origin to indicate that point where man is articulated on something other than himself; it is the point where he is introduced to things older than himself; it is the point where he is bound to that which disperses him in time (OT 328-329). The Origin is both what is closest and farthest from thought, and thought reveals that man is removed in time from that which makes him exist (OT 334-335).
Reclaiming the Origin was one of the major projects of Neitzsche and Heidegger, the former positing it far in the future at the end of Man, the latter placing it in the dim reaches of the past, forever lost to us. And it is this sense of loss which is the driving force behind Existentialism.
If we can take Foucault's description of the Analytic of Finitude as a map of all the possible moves in the Modern episteme, the last hundred years of philosophy appear to following an analyzable pattern. And it is now, at the end of the twentieth century, the Foucault feels that the last options of Modern thought are being played out. The site of knowledge in the Western world is destabilizing, and soon all that was built on that site will vanish as surely as alchemy and General Grammar.
2.132 The Human Sciences and the End of Man
In the Modern episteme, philosophy is subsumed by anthropology. The analysis of the essence of man folds over into an analysis of everything presented to his experience (OT 341). And in the Modern era, we see the emergence of what Foucault calls the "human sciences." By these, he means ethnology (or sociology), psychology, and literature. And Foucault wrote The Order of Things (subtitled åAn Archaeology of the Human Sciences') specifically to examine them and their origins. His analysis will find that the human sciences are a type of knowledge separate from the empirical sciences and philosophy, and will seek to explain "their precariousness, their uncertainty as sciences, their dangerous familiarity with philosophy, their ill-defined reliance on other domains of knowledge, their perpetually secondary and derived character, and also their claim to universality" (OT 348).
As we shall see, the uncomfortable position of the human sciences is not a result of the density of their object, but rather their complex epistemological space in which they find themselves. The first task, then, is to chart the position of the human sciences in the modern episteme.
The Modern episteme is most accurately mapped as a three-dimensional space. Its three axes are the physical and mathematical sciences, the empirical sciences, and philosophical reflection. These axes, in turn, define three planes. Along the plane defined by the mathematical and empirical axes, we find all of the applications of math to the empirical sciences. The plane defined by the empirical and philosophical axes creates an area for the investigation into the being of empiricities. And the project of formalizing thought is carried out on the plane formed by the mathematical and philosophical axes (OT 346-347).
We find the human sciences in the volume thus defined, though not along its dimensions or on any of the planes described above (OT 347) But the human sciences should not be seen as extensions of biology, political economy, and philology. They are rather an analysis of man's positivity and what enables him to know (OT 353).
Adding to the complexity of the human sciences is that they do not exist in neatly delimited fields. We can have not only a psychology of economics, but a psychology of sociology, and even a psychology of psychology. But the human sciences do have three models that can help to clarify them. The psychological region is located where the living being that is man opens himself to representation. The sociological region is located where the individual represents the society where production and consumption occur. And the study of literature and myth can be found where the laws and forms of language are in effect (OT 355). The human sciences can then be described as being projected onto the surfaces of biology, economics, and linguistics. Upon these surfaces, it revealed that all that can be said about man will be said in terms of function and norm, on the surface of biology; conflict and rule, on the surface of economics; and signification and system, on the surface of language (OT 357).
So it is the general configuration of the Modern episteme that provides the human sciences with their precarious site; they, in turn, constitute man as their object. Man does not provide the human sciences with a domain -- it is they who constitute him (OT 364).
Foucault feels that, of all the human sciences, psychoanalysis and ethnology occupy the most privileged positions. Not because they are better founded than the rest, but because of their position in the episteme. It is psychoanalysis that points directly at the unthought. Unlike the rest of the human sciences which remain within the space of the representable, psychoanalysis addresses itself to that point where the unthought articulates itself in consciousness. And it is psychoanalysis which uncovers the foundation of life with its functions and norms in the figure of Death; the foundation of conflicts and rules in the figure of Desire; the foundation of signification and system in Law (OT 374). And these figures are the very forms of finitude. It is Death that makes man finite, and so makes all knowledge possible; it is Desire that always remains unthought in thought; and Law is that which is promised by the very act of analysis -- the origin assumed by all signification (OT 375).
Ethnology, in showing how biological functions, rules of exchange, and linguistic systems are normalized within a given culture, probes the very foundations of historicity. In fact, it reverses the problem of history by looking not toward man, but toward what makes knowledge about him possible (OT 378).
Both psychoanalysis and ethnology are directed at that which is outside his consciousness and makes possible what is given to or eludes his consciousness (OT 378). Because of this, they can be viewed as "counter-sciences." They seek to situate themselves where knowledge of man relates to what makes that knowledge possible. In so doing, they threaten that which makes it possible for man to be known (OT 381). In leading the human sciences back to their epistemological grounds, the counter-sciences undo the very object determined by those sciences (OT 379). They unmake the figure of Man. And were the current arrangement of the episteme to dissociate -- and Foucault's analysis makes it seem likely that this event may be near -- Man "would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (OT 387).
2.2 The Archaeology of Knowledge
Near the end of The Order of Things, Foucault states that archaeology has two tasks with regard to the human sciences. It must first determine their arrangement in the episteme, and it must then show how that configuration is different from the empirical sciences (OT 366). This comment may serve as threshold into Foucault's intimidatingly-titled book, The Archaeology of Knowledge. In this work, Foucault turns his attention away from specific discourses and toward method. The Archaeology of Knowledge is both an investigation into the nature of Foucault's still largely-proposed science of archaeology, and an outline of how it should proceed.
The book opens with a general reflection on history. Foucault claims that the problem confronting the historian is the constitution of series: their elements, boundaries, relations, and laws. In the analysis of series, discontinuity -- once the historian's bane, the very thing he sought to remove from history -- has become a basic element, both to the series themselves and the relations between them (AK 7,8). It is discontinuity that holds the greatest fascination for Foucault, and he will elevate it to the most critical importance to both discourse and any possible study to which it may yield itself.
Having introduced the notion of discontinuity, Foucault turns his attention to the other crucial component of archaeology: the document. According to Foucault, the document is the central question of both forms of historical description: the history of ideas, which focuses ever more sharply on discontinuity, and history itself, which has become a study of broad, stable structures (AK 6). "History is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked" (AK 7).
With these tools in hand, Foucault will now undertake the task of describing just exactly what the archaeological approach entails, and what it will imply for the history of ideas. "My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge" (AK 15).
Though a complex and convoluted work, The Archaeology of Knowledge really is a bare outline of a book, sketching out a project Foucault never finished. And being a purely theoretical treatise, it lacks the grounding in actual documents and discourses that made The Order of Things so engaging and persuasive. Nonetheless, it contains many profound conclusions about the nature of language and its transformations through time.
2.21 The Unities of Discourse
One of the aims of archaeology is to discover the true unities of discourse, to discover whether there may some more accurate way to group statements and documents that under traditional classifications like "medicine" and "economics." To fulfill this aim, we must do three things. First, we must renounce the desire to discover secret origins in discourse, and the suppositions that everything in discourse is contained in the silence that precedes it (AK 25). Next, we must discard all themes which assert the continuity of discourse (AK 25). And finally, we must suspend the traditional unties of discourse (AK 26). The only purpose to which we will put them is to question their legitimacy -- what are their continuities and laws? Are they merely the surface effects of more firmly grounded unities? By suspending the unities that we are most accustomed to, we "bracket out" meaning from our analysis and free up the entire field of effective statements. "One is led to a pure description of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the unities which form within it" (AK 26, 27).
The description of discursive events is distinguished from the analysis of language by a principle of finitude. A language is a system of possible statements, whereas the field of discursive events is always finite, limited to the already said (AK 27).
Having eliminated the "given unities," the statement is allowed to emerge in its specificity. This same suspension also reveals discontinuity to be a simple fact of the statement -- each and every one is a tiny irruption on the surface of discourse (AK 28). Foucault's view of the statement is completely atomistic. Discourse is discrete, and its unities do not penetrate the statement.
Our analysis, then, is directed at finding a basis for some discursive unity -- what Foucault calls a discursive formation. After a preliminary evaluation of some of the more obvious choices, Foucault rejects objects, subjects, concepts and themes as compelling grounds for a discursive formation. Any conceivable discourse, he says, is a field of successive emergences of these entities, a space where they arise and are transformed. Therefore, he will attempt to see if regularity cannot be found in these dispersions. He will search, then, not for chains of inference or tables of difference, but for systems of dispersion (AK 37).
Allow me to pause to fix two important parts of the vocabulary of archaeology. A discursive formation is any group of statements in which a system of dispersion can be described between objects, subjects, concepts, and strategies. Rules of formation are the conditions of existence of all the elements of a given discursive formation (AK 38).
Foucault now turns his attention to describing how a discourse determines its various elements. The simplest of these are objects. Their formation is made possible by the relations between authorities of emergence, delimitation, and specification (AK 44). These relations are of three types: primary relations (those exterior to discourse, which exist between institutions, techniques, etc.), secondary relations (which exist between statements within discourse about the primary relations), and discursive relations (which sustain the objects of discourse) (AK 45). If a uniform law of emergence for a group of diverse objects can be discovered, it is possible to identify a discursive formation. In such a formation, disparate or even contradictory objects may arise without modifying the formation itself (AK 44).
The formation of subjects, or enunciative modalities, is determined by the relations between a given speaker, his institutional site, and his various situations (observing, teaching, practicing, etc.). The place from which statements come is not, then, a transcendental locus of speech -- it is a space determined by a discursive formation (AK 50). The subject of discourse has no unifying function; "he" is dispersed by various enunciative modalities. Discourse, then, is not a phenomenon of expression, but rather a totality that disperses discontinuous subjects that do not regulate enunciations themselves (AK 54-55).
Discourse does not organize concepts in a deductive edifice that can be traced one to the next. Rather, concepts are formed in a field characterized by forms of succession, coexistence, and various procedures of intervention. The network of these elements is the system of conceptual formation (AK 56-60).
This system reveals a schemata for the linkage of statements. This schemata may be one of series, groupings, or reciprocation, but it will outline the space where the common elements of statements appear and dissociate (AK 61). This schemata of relations is what Foucault terms the "preconceptual" level of discourse. He is careful, though, to note that this level doesn't determine concepts. It is, on the contrary, the most superficial level of discourse.
Several sets of things must be located in order to trace the formation of strategic choices ('theme' or 'theory' may be substituted for 'strategy'). One such class is points of diffraction within discourse. Strategies are formed over other dispersions; where two incompatible elements arise in a given discourse, a strategy may appear which comprises both (AK 65). This formation can also be traced according to that which determines which of a set of possible alternatives are realized. Certain possible strategies are excluded by the relationship between the discourse at hand and other discourses. These relations may be those of a formal system or model, mutual delimitation of fields of application. Relations of analogy, opposition, or complementarity can also exclude possible strategic options (AK 67). Strategic choices are also authorized by the functions the discourse in question carries out in a field of non-discursive practices (AK 68).
There is a vertical system of dependencies between strategy, concept, subject, and object. Each type of formation is authorized by the anterior one, objects being simplest. But the lower levels are not independent of those above them. Certain strategic choices, for instance, use and exclude various concept-forming rules, and thus play a role in the determination of future concepts. And so on down the chain (AK 72-73).
We now have a set of guidelines for identifying the dispersions which are characteristic of a discursive formation. At this point, Foucault looks back over the work he has done to this point, and casts the light of his current methodological analysis upon it. In so doing, he attempts to recast the earlier work as part of a much more coherent whole than it really is. With a theory of discourse that divides it into object, subject, concept, and strategy, he claims that Madness and Civilization was an archaeology of objects, or rather a particular object (madness). The Birth of the Clinic is cited as an example of an archaeology of the subject of the physician, and The Order of Things is now called an analysis of the formation and dispersion of a group of concepts. A book on strategies is yet to be written.
However, this is not quite the case. As Dreyfus and Rabinow point out, Madness and Civilization takes madness to be an object that exists prior to discourse -- an object which psychiatric discourse has approached in various ways over the centuries, but which remains in some measure forever inaccessible. Which is diametrically opposed to the archaeological view that discourse determines its objects. And the general theme of The Order of Things is a description of the various sites of knowledge (the preliminary criteria for any act of ordering) in the Western world. To cast it as an analysis of the formation of a group of concepts may be convenient for the claims of The Archaeology of Knowledge (and may not even be completely inaccurate), but it disregards both the intent and accomplishments of that book.
The Archaeology of Knowledge, then, is not truly an explanation of the method that was employed in Foucault's previous books so much as an outline for an approach to history that has been perfected over the course of many years and several books. I'm ambivalent about Foucault's attempt to claim all of his previous work as instances of method that didn't actually exist when that work was done, but it should be enough for my purposes to simply note it and move on to the next part of the project -- the description of the statement.
2.22 The Statement
Having examined the groupings that statements may form, Foucault turns his attention to the atom of discourse itself -- the statement. As it turns out, the statement is much more problematic than was suspected. In the first section of the Archaeology, Foucault glossed over the nature of the statement, opting to concentrate on discursive unities. At this point, "statement" is a vague notion, but one Foucault hopes can be understood well enough so that discussing groups of them makes some sense.
So then, what is a statement? Foucault looks at a number of things that might qualify, but in the end, none of them are up to the job. Neither sentences, propositions, or "speech acts" will serve as the model for statements. In each case, the defining criteria are too restrictive (AK 84). Adding to the problem of statements is that they may exist in the absence of any regular linguistic construction (AK 86). To modify Foucault's example, the string 'asdfghjkl' may be nonsense, but it may also be a statement about the configuration of keys on my computer. At this point, one might be tempted to say that any group of signs is a statement, but this will not serve either, obviously.
Foucault's approach is to settle on the idea of a statement as a function of signs, as opposed to some structure. This function is what allows one to say that a given series of signs "makes sense" (AK 86). The function of the statement, which Foucault terms the 'enunciative function,' is what allows groups of signs like sentences, propositions, and maps to exist. But this function is not to be confused with functions that allow groups of signs to be elements of a language. Those functions are grammatical, not enunciative (AK 88).
The statement can be defined as a modality of existence belonging to a group of signs that allows it to relate to a domain of objects, prescribe a position to a subject, be situated amongst other formulations, and have a repeatable materiality (AK 107). Before these domains can be described in further detail, it should be noted that the four domains of the enunciative function (the referential, subject, associated field, and materiality) correspond to the four directions in which discursive formations are analyzed (the formation of objects, subjects, concepts, and strategies) (AK 116).
The referential is comprised of the laws of possibility for the objects addressed within a statement. The referential defines that which gives meaning to sentences and truth to propositions; it characterizes the enunciative level of a formulation (as opposed to the grammatical or logical levels) (AK 91).
The subject of the statement does not equal the author of the formulation. A given formulation is not a statement because we can analyze the relationship between speaker and speech, but because the position of the speaker can be determined from it (AK 95).
Unlike sentences and propositions, statements are not isolable; they belong always to a series or a whole -- an associated field. The statements that "people the borders" of a given statement are those that form the series in which the statement appears, those to which it refers, those made possible by the statement, and those statements of equal value (AK 97-99).
Finally, the enunciative function is characterized by a specific and repeatable materiality. In other words, a statement must have material existence, but this materiality is not defined by the space or time a statement occupies, but rather a set of material institutions that define possibilities of reinscription and transcription (AK 100, 102-103).
With a somewhat clearer idea of 'statement,' Foucault can now discuss how they should be analyzed. Foremost, the analysis of statements avoids all interpretation. Remember that the meaning of any given discourse has been "bracketed out" of archaeological analysis. So an analysis of statements will question their mode of existence, but not what they "really said." The search for the true meaning of a statement is not our concern. In addition, there are no latent statements. They have gaps, limits, and exclusions, but these are not to be confused with hidden meaning (AK 109-110). "The analysis of statements corresponds to a specific level of description" (AK 108). It is an attempt to isolate the regularities of groups of statements, and not to find some deeper level of meaning.
The analysis of statements is conditioned by rarity, exteriority, and accumulation. Rarity is the assumption that everything is never said. Statements are "rare" in the field of possibilities, ad their analysis does not involve seeking the "unsaid" within them, nor some common text to which they all belong. This analysis accepts discourse as a distribution of gaps, limits, and divisions (AK 119). In addition, the field of statements is not to be described in terms of processes that take place elsewhere (particularly in a conscious subject); it is rather an empirical, surface description that operates without reference to a cogito or speaking subject (AK 121-122). Finally, the analysis of statements does not attempt to trace their origin; it merely seeks to describe their forms of accumulation (AK 123).
To describe a group of statements in terms of rarity, exteriority, and accumulation is to establish a positivity; it is to define the type of positivity of a discourse (AK 125). The positivity thus uncovered is the discursive formation (AK 115).
Discourses have a positivity which "defines a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical interchanges may be deployed" (AK 127). This positivity acts as a historical a priori. What this odd term means is that a discursive formation is a set of preliminary conditions for the formation of statements. It is an a priori because it determines conditions of possibility; it is historical because it is not an atemporal structure imposed on discourse from outside -- it transforms through time.
If the historical a priori is the set of conditions for the formation of statements, the archive is that which defines their enunciability and mode of occurrence. The archive is the set of all discursive practices which establish statements as events and things (AK 128). It is not a great unity; it is that which differentiates and specifies discourses (AK 129).
Foucault now turns to a general description of the archaeological project and how it must be carried out. But before I cover this discussion, it will be useful to first fix the vocabulary of Foucault's new science of history.
A discursive practice is a body of anonymous, historical rules that determine the conditions of operation for the enunciative function (AK 117). It is essentially another term for the idea of a historical a priori.
A discursive formation is the law of a series of statements, the principle of dispersion for a group of statements (AK 107).
A discourse is a group of statements that belong to the same discursive formation. This unity is neither formal nor repeatable; it is always a finite group whose conditions of existence can be defined (AK 117).
The archive causes statements to appear as regular events. "It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" (AK 130).
Archaeology can now be defined as that which "describes discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive" (AK 131).
2.23 Archaeological Description
Archaeology is opposed to the traditional history of ideas in several regards. Archaeology rejects its great themes: genesis, continuity, and totalization (AK 138). It treats discourse as monument, not document, with the aim of a differential analysis of its statements, and not with the search for a continuous hidden text. Archaeology is not concerned with a creative subject, nor does it seek the origin of discourse. Lastly, archaeology does not try to restore what thought is in itself (AK 138-139).
The history of ideas, in Foucault's estimation, is wont to divide statements into original and regular, new and old. Archaeology, on the other hand, views all statements as regular, at least in the sense that for every statement, a set of conditions can be designated which make it possible (AK 144). However, archaeology does designate a hierarchy of statements. This is hierarchy of enunciative derivation. It extends from "statements that put into operation rules of formation in their most extended form" to statements formed by highly localized and delimited rules (AK 147).
The history of ideas treats contradictions as either appearances to be resolved by analysis, or as founding principles of discourse. Archaeology treats them as neither, but as objects to be described for themselves. No effort is made by the archaeologist to either dissipate or radicalize them (AK 151). Contradictions can be intrinsic to discourse, coming about from different ways of forming statements within one positivity. These occur at different levels and play different functional roles in a discursive practice. Contradictions between separate discursive formations are termed 'extrinsic' and have nothing to offer analysis (AK 153).
Archaeology must not only describe discursive formations individually; it must also compare them to one another and relate them to the non-discursive practices which are their element (AK 157). The number of networks of interpositivity between different discourses is not set in advance. Archaeological analysis must ferret them out. For instance, the interpositivity described in The Order of Things occupies no privileged position -- it is merely one of many such networks. Discursive formations do not belong to only one system, but are simultaneously involved in several. To describe such a network is not to call some unity into being (AK 159). Archaeology seeks to uncover the play of analogy and difference at the level of rules of formation; to seek isomorphisms, models, shifts, and correlations between discourses (AK 160).
Though Foucault has referred to discourse as being more like a monument than a document, he does not want to give the impression that archaeology is diachronic, blind to change and transformation. Archaeology, in fact, must chart change, but the historicity of discursive practices is neither strictly temporal nor linear. Therefore, it is only archaeology that can reveal the appearance, disappearance, and substitution of various discursive formations (AK 168-171). The type of change or rupture in discourse that is revealed is not a homogenous process. Rather than a single break that sweeps all formations along at once, it is characterized by a series of transformations between two positivities (AK 175). Such a rupture can be compared to changing a spiderweb by moving (or removing) its anchors one at a time. One is not presented with a new configuration all at once -- there are many components that must be shifted to reveal a new arrangement.
Foucault has now constructed a sufficient armature to explain what knowledge is in archaeological terms, and how archaeology relates to the analysis of the sciences. Knowledge is, quite simply, a group of elements formed by discursive practice; it is the very group of objects, enunciative modalities, concepts, and strategic choices whose dispersion was described earlier (AK 182). This group of elements does not, in itself, constitute a science, but it is indispensable to science. In other words, knowledge can exist in the absence of science, but there is no knowledge without a discursive practice. Sciences, then, appear in a discursive formation against a general background of knowledge (AK 184).
Knowledge goes through a series of several distinct emergences within a discursive formation. The first of these is the threshold of positivity, which is the moment when a discursive practice achieves autonomy, when it becomes a single system for the formation of statements. Knowledge passes the threshold of epistemologization when a group of statements claims norms of verification and coherence. A general area of knowledge thus formed crosses the threshold of scientificity when its statements begin to obey formal criteria and laws for the construction of propositions. Finally, when a science is able to define its own axioms, elements, propositional structures, and acceptable transformations, we say it has passed the threshold of formalization (AK 186-187).
At this point, Foucault sums up the archaeological project -- the description of discursive formations and their relations to epistemological figures such as sciences -- as the analysis of the episteme. The meaning of the term has changed quite a bit since its appearance in The Order of Things, and here Foucault uses it to denote "the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to the epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems" (AK 191) It is what, "in the positivity of discursive practices, makes possible the existence of epistemological figures and sciences" (AK 192). The analysis of the episteme questions what it means for a science to exist, and does so in terms of historical processes.
Foucault finishes The Archaeology of Knowledge with an exchange with a fictional interlocutor which is intended to clear up any misconceptions about what he has attempted to do. In it, he reassures us that the positivities he has established are not imposed on thought from the outside, but neither do they inhabit thought. They are simply a set of conditions for a practice. Rather than a set of limitations placed on thought, they are the field in which thought is articulated. Ultimately, he has tried "to show that to speak is to do something -- something other than to express what one thinks," and to show us what is involved when one attempts to add a statement to a pre-existing series (AK 208). As it turns out, there is so much involved in making any new statement that we are almost entirely at the mercy of our language.
2.3 The Abandonment of Archaeology
We know that the project outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge was left unfinished, that Foucault turned his attention to other matters entirely. But why? Dreyfus and Rabinow offer a few explanations, the most compelling of which is that Foucault's analysis was caught in an oscillation between description and prescription that, ironically enough, has much in common with the doublets he describes in The Order of Things.
This repetition of opposites comes about, in part, because of Foucault's structuralist tendencies. Now, Foucault always denied being a structuralist -- sometimes quite peevishly (OT xiv). But his work became increasingly structuralist over time, and The Archaeology of Knowledge is so structuralist that even Foucault admits that his methods are "not entirely foreign" to those of structuralism (AK 15). In the works discussed in this paper, he presents a view which makes discourse out to be autonomous from other practices and entities. Foucault is well aware of the importance of non-discursive practices, but never fills out the promised version of their role in the formation of statements. The non-discursive element is particularly important to the formation of strategies -- a subject Foucault never addressed in detail. But despite this awareness, he is determined to portray discourse as a system which determines its own context. All those things normally taken to be external to discourse: things, speakers, ideas, and theories, are formed within discourse. And it is this flirtation with the structuralist notion of an autonomous discourse which founders the archaeological project.
To begin, Foucault feels that archaeology is merely a matter of description. When he speaks of the preliminary criteria for knowledge and the formation of statements he claims to be simply describing regularities which are to be found on the surface of discourse. Very early on in The Archaeology of Knowledge, he says that with his approach to discourse "One is led to a pure description of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the unities that form within it" (AK 27). It would seem obvious that if one is intent on bracketing out not only the truth of various statements in an analysis, but their very sense as well, that one wouldn't find oneself engaged in uncovering deeper truths about them. And for awhile, Foucault seems to think so too, as he later says that "the analysis of statements corresponds to a specific level of description" (AK 108).
But the matter becomes more complex once Foucault has introduced the notion of a discursive practice. This term denotes the set of rules of formation for statements, and there is some confusion as to what kind of rules these are. Foucault does make it clear what the rules are not, however. The systems of statement formation are neither transcribed on the surface of discourse by non-discursive entities (institutions or socioeconomic relations, for instance). Nor are they to be found in the thoughts of men (AK 73-74). So they aren't rules imposed from outside on what we say, and they aren't rules which we follow when we speak.
All of which is fine, as long as Foucault is willing to confine himself to a purely descriptive project. There would be no difficulty in claiming that statements are formed in regular ways, and that those regularities are describable. Foucault says exactly this: "the field of statements [ä] is accepted, in its empirical modesty, as the locus of particular events, regularities, relationships, modifications, and systematic transformations" (AK 121). Discourse is to be treated as a practical domain whose regularities are simply empirical ones which may be described in much the same manner as a scientist systematizes natural phenomena. These rules of formation, then, do not dictate what may or may not be said, they are simply descriptions of what is and is not said. "To define a system of formation in its specific individuality is therefore to characterize a group of statements by the regularity of a practice" (AK 74).
So when Foucault speaks of the unity of a discourse as being "a group of rules that are immanent in a practice" we could take him to mean mere empirical laws (AK 46). But things are not so simple. Having described anonymous systems which disperse objects and subjects, it is obvious to Foucault that he has uncovered something more powerful than a group of surface regularities. He has made a very convincing case in The Order of Things that there are real relations between discursive practices and the "discourse-objects" that appear in history.
And this feeling is echoed throughout The Archaeology of Knowledge. As early as the discussion of objects, he says that "one cannot speak of anything at any time;" that there are discursive relations which "determine the group of relations that discourse must establish in order to speak of this or that object" (AK 44,46). A speaker no longer acts according to a rule so much as follows one. And again: "By system of formation, then, I mean a complex group of relations that functions as a rule: it lays down what must be related [...] for such and such an enunciation to be made" (AK 74). Even more explicitly: "if there really is a unity, [ä] it resides, well anterior to their formation, in the system that makes possible and governs that formation" (AK 72). Finally, Foucault even defines a discursive practice as a body of anonymous, historical rules that determine the conditions of operation for the enunciative function (AK 117).
So if these rules are prescriptive, what authorizes them? Foucault has excluded nearly everything that could ground them. Dreyfus and Rabinow sum up the corner into which Foucault has painted himself:
It is this oscillation that Dreyfus and Rabinow find responsible for a long silence that is finally broken by the new work -- genealogy -- which abandons the theoretical notion of rules of formation in favor of an analysis of strategic choices and their relation to social practices.
2.4 The Episteme
I think it will be useful to trace the development of Foucault's notion of an episteme before moving on to the next section. The idea is a complex one that moves through a series of transformations over the course of the two books I have discussed. In addition, a complete grasp of what Foucault means by the term will be crucial in a later section.
The first formulation of the idea appears in the Preface of The Order of Things. Foucault introduces it by way of a discussion of aphasia.
He asks "On what 'table', according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things?" (OT xix) This idea of a 'table' or site for the act of ordering, is the crux of The Order of Things, and will receive considerable refinement in the pages to come. This 'site' is a bit more fully characterized when Foucault says that all ordering acts, being dictated neither by the objects ordered nor by logical necessity, must have some set of preliminary criteria. "A 'system of elements' -- a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and, lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and below which there is a similitude -- is indispensable for the establishment of even the simplest form of order" (OT xx). It is this 'system of elements' that serves as the site for order, and is our first rough definition of episteme. The term itself is introduced a few pages later when he says that "what I attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge [...] grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history [...] of its conditions of possibility" (OT xxiii).
Further insight into the nature of an episteme is provided by Foucault's description of a historical a priori. This is another way to talk about preliminary criteria for knowing. The term itself is meant to imply that any act of ordering must put the above-mentioned system of elements into operation. However, this system is not necessary in the logical sense. It is, in fact, subject to and determined by history. "This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, [...] and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true" (OT 158). It is this notion that fully forms Foucault's concept of an anonymous site of knowledge that determines what can and cannot be said and is transformed through time.
It is important to note that on the subject of these transformations, Foucault is silent. The breaks between the Renaissance episteme and the Classical, the Classical and the Modern are deep ruptures whose causes cannot be found within discourse.
So, it is not the task of the archaeologist to explain these discontinuities. This response, or lack of one, has two possible explanations. The one Foucault would offer is that the project of archaeology is to describe the surface of discourse, to show the arrangements of these document-monuments and uncover the basic patterns that can be discovered and possibly determine the shape of those monuments (see the last section for an explanation of the confusion on this last point). To explain why the space of knowledge suddenly changes is precisely the search for deep meaning which archaeology seeks to avoid.
But the fact remains that the most dramatic events of The Order of Things are quietly passed over, and this silence is deeply troubling. Both to the reader, and, I suspect, to Foucault himself. And it is possible that the cause of this silence is Foucault's insistence on a discourse which determines its own context. Since he can look neither to a conscious subject nor to non-discursive practices for an explanation of discursive formations, he is left with a discourse which regulates itself -- position which only becomes stronger in The Archaeology of Knowledge. And such a system makes these all-encompassing changes, these irruptions which transform everything in their wake, completely enigmatic.
The notion of a historical a priori undergoes some development in Foucault's next book. The most striking modification is the level of causal efficacy he ascribes it. It still characterizes the unity of a discourse through time, but its power now extends very specifically to the formation of individual statements. The historical a priori is now said to define "a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical interchanges may be deployed. [...] What I mean by the term is [...] a condition of reality for statements" (AK 127).
The consequences of this shift for the notion of an episteme are profound. It is at this point that Foucault offers his oft-quoted definition of an episteme. I have seen this definition in many articles about Foucault, but oddly enough, it is this definition which is usually offered to explain what an episteme is in the context of The Order of Things. But by this time, an episteme is doing considerably more work than it did in that book.
Though even here we can see some oscillation between a mere description of discovered regularity and rules that prescribe the forms discourse can take, it is obvious from all this talk of "legislation" and "imposition" that the episteme of The Archaeology of Knowledge a regulatory entity -- one made problematic by its inability to be grounded outside of discourse itself.
It is these problems of ground, regulation, and the role of non-discursive practices that spell the end of the archaeological project. These problems were directly addressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his approaches are discussed in the next section.
